The original post: /r/television by /u/Indifferent_Jackdaw on 2025-04-12 13:59:58.
The tl;dr is that this is just boring and dull adaption which entirely wastes a very good cast and a beautiful setting.
My personal feeling is that ITV productions nail Agatha Christie adaptations. David Suchet’s Poirot and Joan Hickson’s and Julia McKenzie’s Miss Marples capture the tone of the books so perfectly, a little bit of humour, but they take the murder seriously. Which forces other adaptations to differentiate themselves by other means. The BBC chose Dark and Arty.
And they were initially successful. And then they were None and The Witness for the Prosecution were both good. But other adaptations have been just fine or underwhelming, until we come now to Towards Zero which is just plain bad.
Agatha Christie stories range from excellent to fine. But one thing she could never be accused of is a lack of clarity. I spent a fair amount of time confused by how all the characters were connected. Why is Matthew Rhys detective being randomly summoned by Angelica Houston? Why is her companion writing to the cousin when according to the timeline they should never have met? Let’s just throw the Solicitors ward into the mix for no good reason. Let’s not have any family member of the dead boy backstory thrown in as red herrings. All that is jarring, but not nearly as jarring as trying to work out the psychology of the central throuple. Which is eventually revealed but not in a way that felt earned. The mystery was presented in an unsatisfying way at a leaden pace.
I am not inclined to fault the actors. I actually thought they were doing the best they could. Although as a person who is extremely ignorant of make-up, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out if the hair and make-up people hated Mimi Keene or if it was just a failure to adapt a historical make-up style to her different type of beauty. But her make-up felt extremely jarring while everyone else in the diverse cast had very polished looks. Costuming, setting, photography were all very stylish. A nice foil wrapping for a turd of a mini-series.